Years ago, I read an interview with Ethan Canin and Elizabeth Stuckey-French in The Southeast Review that has done more to shape my process than any other single influence. Here’s the heart of it:

Excerpted from The Southeast Review, Volume 27, Number 2:  The Lie that Chokes the Reader: A Conversation with Ethan Canin and Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Forrest Anderson:  I wanted to ask you about planning your own material. . . (You seem) to suggest that you don’t plan your books.  Are you a mapper?

Ethan Canin:  I’m an explorer, but then a mapper.  I have no idea where a novel is going.  I don’t know the plot. I don’t know the characters.  

Elizabeth Stuckey-French:  You don’t do any planning ahead of time?  

Ethan Canin:  Zero. My last novel—America, America—started with a scene.  I was despondent, which is pretty much standard, and I was looking through this file of aborted things. . . I found the scene of this guy on a sailboat.  This girl jumps off the back into the lake. That one seemed decent. I started with that. Then, I had to make up a wealthy family, and a working class kid.  So, I kind of came up with a novel, sort of a novel. . . Once it’s kind of sketched in, then I map it out. I make a huge storyboard and I try to fit the scenes together. . . It gets to be sort of a logic puzzle as to how to put it together at the end.  

Elizabeth Stuckey-French:  What’s a storyboard?

Ethan Canin:  I take a big sheet of what they call extruded polystyrene, which is rigid foam insulation. . . It’s 4×8 but it weighs about six ounces.  I get multicolored index cards, and each color corresponds to a plot. Since you can’t hold an entire novel in your hand, it’s the only way I can begin to look at it.  I can look at it and say, “There’s not enough of the orange plot. About halfway through, the reader may be forgetting about the orange plot.”  

Elizabeth Stuckey-French:  What do you write on the cards?  

Ethan Canin:  I write in big letters so I can see across the room what the scene is about.  . . . I write a couple of distinctive words that are in that scene . . . Then I write a psychological precis of it — Clara is flirting with Cory — and then I write some other logical dictate:  “This has to follow a scene where we first meet Clara, but it has to precede the scene where Cory makes out with his sister or something.” I’m trying to organize it. . . you forget there are lots of logical dictates to a story that you don’t really see when you don’t have a storyboard.